On Not Totally Seeing a Total Solar Eclipse

A total solar eclipse as seen from Vágar, on the Faroe Islands, on Friday, March 20th.

Photograph by Eric Adams/AP

There were only two places in the world from which this year’s total solar eclipse could be seen on land. One was Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago north of the Arctic Circle, and the other was the Faroe Islands, which lie halfway between Scotland and Iceland. The Faroes bring to mind Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime: “tranquillity tinged with terror.” Volcanic in origin, the islands are scattered over the water in roughly the shape of an arrowhead, erupting out of the sea in imposing basalt cliffs. But their light and landscape are muted—mellow greens, reds, yellows, and grays that are echoed in the houses. Nearly half of the forty-eight thousand Faroese live on Streymoy, the largest of the eighteen islands, most of them in the capital, Tórshavn, where the street lighting is gentle, the signage is spare, and the stores give the impression of being closed even when they’re open.

In the few days leading up to last Friday, more than eleven thousand eclipse chasers came to the Faroes to witness totality, the moment at which the moon moves fully in front of the sun, leaving visible only the ring of the corona. They arrived by plane and by cruise ship, laden with meteorological and camera equipment, their mood a mixture of businesslike intent and deep yearning. (Fred Espenak, a former NASA astrophysicist known as Mr. Eclipse, was on his twenty-seventh such outing.) Everyone asked everyone else where they planned to watch it. Which island? Which side of which island? On a hill or down by the sea? Søren Jacobsen, a Danish meteorologist, recommended a place with some altitude, “but not too much.” Faroese weather, he noted, is “not a very clear-cut situation.” Climb too high and you might find yourself suddenly in a cloud. There would be twenty-seven planes observing the eclipse above the islands, but the rest of us had to accept that whether we headed northeast, as we were advised on Wednesday, or northwest, as we were advised on Thursday, the odds remained at two to one against clear skies. When the British were stationed on the Faroes, during the Second World War, they named the place the Land of Maybe.

It is easy to forget, when the sky goes dark, that an eclipse is an optical illusion. The sun is four hundred times larger than the moon but also four hundred times more distant, on average, from Earth. Totalities, in particular, require precise alignment, and do not repeat themselves in the same place very often—about once every three hundred and seventy-five years. (In the coming eons, the frequency will drop, as the moon slips away in its orbit and the sun expands.) But, celestially, the Faroese are quite lucky; they have become well acquainted with total eclipses. One of their national legends, about four bickering shepherd brothers who are silenced by a terrible darkness, is thought to date from the total solar eclipse of May 30, 1612. They will see their next total eclipse a mere two hundred and thirty years from now, and their last one happened about sixty years ago.

The 2015 totality was to be Finnur Johansen’s second. He lives just along the road from the house where, at midday on June 30, 1954, he watched the moon obscure the sun and his mother-in-law’s chickens rush into the henhouse, tuck their heads under their wings, and go to sleep. When the light returned, a few minutes later, the cock crowed and the chickens reëmerged. Johansen remembers the flowers closing and opening, and how after that brief dark moment he was struck afresh by their colors. The National Museum of the Faroe Islands holds many other accounts from that year. Sverri Dahl, the keeper of national antiquities, wrote simply: “The solar eclipse. The cathedral and colors. The birds are flying, but silence this very moment.” The state geologist, Jóannes Rasmussen, was similarly concise: “Rain and foggy, impossible to work, the solar eclipse was from 11.06 to 1.32.” A woman named Erla Kirstin Viberg recalled her mother telling her to bring in the sheets from the clothesline so that they wouldn’t burn. “People were talking about total destruction,” Viberg wrote. When the world didn’t end, they had lunch and went back to work.

I was awoken, on Friday morning, by people outside my window excitedly photographing a patch of sky, which was a shocking blue after three days of clouds. I took Jacobsen’s advice and went halfway up a hill above Tórshavn, from where there was a grand view of the bay over which the sun would ostensibly be shining at 8:38 A.M., when “first contact”—the moment at which the moon edges into the sun—was due to occur. The movement of the heavenly bodies is easier for us to predict than the weather over our heads. Clouds appeared and disappeared as if by sleight of hand; no one seemed able to make sense of it. All around me, men were nursing their cameras, taking lens filters and rain covers on and off.

On a hill overlooking the capital city of Tórshavn.

Photograph by Matt Dunham/AP

Ten minutes before first contact, the sun became briefly visible. People cheered even as the clouds slid back into place, the sun retreating as if suffering from stage fright. Now and then it slunk behind a lacy veil of cloud, the bite in its side growing larger. This was the moment for eclipse glasses, since looking at even a mostly obscured sun can cause retinal damage. In 1954, according to Johansen, people used welding masks or the bottoms of green bottles for eye protection; this year, flimsy Mylar glasses were handed out in Tórshavn’s shopping mall. The glasses’ effect is the opposite of 3-D, the view becoming a diagram of itself, a tiny yellow disc being swallowed by darkness. The process is so gradual as to be nearly indiscernible, and watching it is rather like watching a flower open.

As totality approached, heavy clouds rolled in and we lost sight of the sun. But an eclipse isn’t only about what’s going on in the sky. The air started to thicken and dull, the bay gradually blackening, like an unfixed photograph. The bar of light on the horizon melted and we disappeared into the moon’s hundred-mile-long shadow. However prepared the mind is for a total eclipse, the body has its own response. The throwing of the celestial dimmer switch confounds the senses. Light drains away, silence falls. For me, it was as if the world were withdrawing from contact. I felt something of the terror that lies in tranquility—how much I depended on natural laws that, right then, on an immense scale, were being broken.

After precisely two minutes of totality, there was a smooth transition back into light. Just as Johansen said, what hits the eye first after the darkness is color. March 20th was also the first day of spring, and the eclipse seemed to reverse us back into winter and then accelerate us forward again. Virginia Woolf reported the same in 1927, when she travelled to the North of England to witness an eclipse: “rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded … the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over—this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct.” When the light returned, Woolf saw colors “as if washed over and repainted.” You find yourself trying to keep up with what you are watching and afterward wondering immediately about the next one. “Then—it was over till 1999,” she wrote.

The Faroese weather was so variable that people half a mile away were able to see what I missed and what the eclipse chasers were all after—the sun inked out, a moment’s absolute blackness, the corona flaring and the light reëmerging over the uneven surface of the moon in globules, creating the effects known as the diamond ring and Baily’s beads. There was a sense of anticlimax that hadn’t only to do with the fact that some of us had failed to see totality. The post-eclipse world looked flatly ordinary, the bay very much evoking Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” complete with the indifferent ship that, as W. H. Auden wrote in his poem about the painting, “Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” It was over ’til 2245.